The Zoo over Ambuscade Street

It's a good life! (no-reg link)

*sniirk* The end was the best part:

But members of Bush's traveling entourage were amused to discover upon entering the G-8 Media Center in Georgia last week that Secret Service agents removed from their luggage such innocuous items as perfume, shaving gel, wine and, best of all, olive oil. A spokesman for the Secret Service said this is standard procedure and that there is no heightened fear that an assailant is plotting to drizzle the president with salad dressing.

This strikes me as a Good Thing - there's too many examples of unethical behavior in both parties, and it needs to stop. Maybe making a few examples of leaders in both parties will stop some of the more egregious corruption. (Cynical Inner Self: *falls onto the floor laughing hysterically*) Especially when you take obvious conflicts of interest like these into account.

In the "Good Idea, Bad Execution" department is this little gem. Most of you probably know that I'm more than passingly familiar with the innards of the medical world, and I think it's telling that every single nurse and doctor I know thinks that this is a horrible plan that's going to end up costing patients more in the long run. And we're talking about nurses that are willing to go to the trouble to move patients to a different care facility ten miles away so that they're in a district that will pay for $EXPENSIVE_BUT_NECESSARY_STUFF, ranging from morotrized wheelchairs to in-home care. When they think it's a bad idea, I listen.

Neocon stances on stem cell research bother me greatly as well. As do the rabidly pro-life, for that matter. Keep your laws out of my body, thankyouverymuch.

Not feeling good today. I'm having trouble focusing on...anything. I'm wondering if I shouldn't be heading home (I've already been here for four hours, oy).

From the Unwelcome-But-Completely-Not-Unexpected Department:

The Dreaded Work Announcement just happened, and I was made the official Building Point of Contact for our building and one other. Sucks to be me. Badly. BPOC is now my other favorite four-letter word, along with the evil NMCI.

What does all of this mean? The short answer is that I won't have anything even remotely resembling a life from the beginning of August until...who knows when. Theoretically, around the end of October, but this is NMCI we're talking about which means...never. Good: Lots of overtime, increased responsibility right around Happy Raise and Bonus Time.

Bad: Lots. No life outside of work. Probably not being able to take the graduate networking course they're offering starting in...August. No life at all. Lots of work, lots of stress, lots of responsibility. On top of all my other work, which flares up into frantic activity that devours all of my time unexpectedly, much like an Unpleasant Rash.

The Long and Unpleasant meeting of last week was actually a BPOC meeting. I read about half of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom during it (Yay for free HTML ebooks!), which in hindsight may not have been the best choice, but much of it was rehashing of information I already know. Sigh. Lots of work, and not the slightest clue of where to begin.

...I think I'll start with some of the homemade Chinese Dumplings that Fu-Master brought in. Yum!

Must...resist...tinfoil...

Once again we have a situation where Those Who Would Know are saying these things are a really, really, really bad idea, and are being ignored by those in power (either political or economic).

To repeat a few key points, a voter-verifiable paper trail is not a receipt the voter can take with them. Receipts are a baaaaaad idea. Very bad. Like "You know, we're going to be downsizing soon...oh by the way, show me who you voted for" bad. We don't want to go there. A paper trail simply means that there are actual, countable, unchangable paper representations of the votes made on each machine, so that if the results are ever called into question there can be a recount.

Also, while we're on the subject, internet voting is also a horridly bad idea. Like "My friend Vinnie here is going to help you vote while I look after your sick father" kind of bad. But I digress.

I've heard the outcry from computer security professionals likened to the public outcry when mechanical voting machines were first announced, but there's a huge difference that these comparisons miss. Namely, the outcry over mechanical voting machines came from people who didn't understand how they worked. The outcry over electronic voting machines is coming from professionals in the computer security field, the sort of person who's going to understand better than anyone else exactly how these things work and exactly how many ways things can go south with them.

Minor technical hiccups, indeed. Many of these voting machines are being "secured" with tamper-proof tape. If the tamper-proof tape has been, ahem, tampered with, then the machine is pulled. Great, but nobody ever seems to mention all the voters who have just been disenfranchised as a direct result.

Some people just miss the point entirely, either by oversight or design. Here's an example from the article (emphasis mine):

State officials say there is no need for recounts, or an audit trail, with the touchscreen system because it was designed to prevent people from voting in the same race more than once — an overvote — and provide multiple alerts to voters to warn them when they are skipping a race — an undervote.

Great, but what do we do if the results are challenged? How do we know if the electronic data has been tampered with? Even better, how can we prove the data wasn't tampered with? Short answer - we don't, can't, and never will.

It can be argues that the point of an election isn't really to decide who wins, it's to prove to the loser that he lacks sufficient support to take control in a less peaceful manner.

What happens to our country when we can no longer trust our elections? A few suffed ballot-boxes here and there don't usually change the course of an election, but a few flipped bits here and there certainly could.

I could go on for much, much longer about the other flaws and perils associated with electronic voting, but I think I've done enough damage for one day.

[EDIT] Nevermind, you didn't really think I could stay away now, did you? Especially not when people are so damned determined to repeat mistakes. Two cursory checks of the new list have already turned up major inaccuracies. A new list drawn up by a group under the direct control of Jeb. I think I'm going to go through my limited stock of outrage rather quickly if things like this continue through November.

This is supremely funny to me, and probably me only, because of a dream I once had. A happy, happy dream...

[EDIT] It's rare to find a page that manages to be both entertaining and informative. Although the entertainment may be located solely in my head.

[EDIT2] Oy. I liked Lyda Morehouse's antichrist better.

I may be forced to kill my husband for the good of humanity.

He's been having trouble with his car for...months, now. Since February, at least. Things like having trouble starting it, having it stall out while idling, riding rough - you know, those things it does when you need a fucking tune up!!!! Yea, he "never had time" to get one done, and his car died completely today.

Having one car between the two of us usually isn't a major hardship - he can get a ride into work with one of his squadmates who lives about half a mile from us. Except Erik's in a class this week, so his hours are roughly the same as mine.

He can't change the spark plugs himself, because we don't have the proper tools. If I drive him to work, that puts me at around 160 miles just to get to work, and I'd still have to pick him up. Ugh.

He supposedly never had time to get a tune up done, even though he has 15 days a month off. I'm feeling a bit bitter right now.